Re: Patch to improve BSD make compatibility

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Jos Backus <address@hidden> writes:

  jb> Here's the patch. I have already tried to convince the FreeBSD
  jb> people to adopt a similar patch (to make BSD make accept $^ as an
  jb> alias for ^>) but that attempt has failed. Please ask if you are
  jb> interested.

Hm.  I don't want to do it this way, since this means that all
references to that variable, everywhere, will be modified.  I admit it's
unlikely that someone will use that variable in other ways but it
doesn't seem like a good idea to hardcode this.  The right way to
implement this is to make this another first-class automatic variable.
That's not hard; I don't need a patch for this.

However, I need to think about this as it's a backward-incompatibility:
it's possible that people are using $> as a variable for other things
and this change would break that.

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